by
Steve Lazarowitz
February 2001
A LESSON IN CONTRAST
Walk into a bookstore and look for the fantasy books. Books like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time or the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. Look at the shelves around these books, full of, in general, fantasy books. Now look up--above the books. More likely than not, the words Science Fiction will be on the sign designating the area.
This is true in all major bookstores. Fantasy and Science fiction have been combined into a single section. Mystery and Romance have their own sections. Why not combine them? Are science fiction and fantasy such similar genres?
While it is true many people that read fantasy also read SF, it's also true that some fans read only one or the other. One of the first comments I received from a reader of my anthologies, chastised me for combining both genres in a single book of stories. He liked the SF stories very much, but doesn't enjoy fantasy.
Being an avid reader in both genres, I'd never really thought about it. On the outside, the two genres are different. Science Fiction, in general, is based upon science and technology and is theoretically possible, at least at the time it's written.
Fantasy maintains no such illusion. The reader simply must accept the world created by the author. It still needs to be both plausible and consistent, but needn't be something that "can" happen.
This brings us to the first difference between the genres. Fantasy requires you to suspend your belief to a greater degree than Science Fiction. We can build a starship. We can travel to distant worlds. There are no such things as dragons on Earth. It's really that simple.
Yet there is another, somewhat more subtle difference between the two genres. This is a generality rather than a rule, but holds true for most books on both sides of the divide. Fantasy tends to be character based, while SF tends to revolve around plot.
As an example, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books, really introduces nothing new. It's the battle of good and evil all over again. The locales change, the history is different, but I feel that I've read this book before. Yet the characters are different and unique. They have personalities I can relate to. At least, they did for the first few books of the series. He should have quit while he was ahead.
Science Fiction, on the other hand, depends on plot devices. In SF, characters are introduced to further the plot. In fantasy, the plot is written to develop the characters. In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, I cared less about the characters than the solution to the mystery. In Paul Levinson's The Silk Code, the characters meant almost nothing to me, but the plot was ingenious and kept me guessing.
Star Wars, in this way, is more like fantasy than SF and many fans consider it to be Science Fantasy- that is a fantasy story that takes place in a SF setting. Consider that Luke was a young man, forced to leave his backwater home to rescue a princess. Tutored by the old Wizard Obiwan Kenobe, he goes off in search of Darth Vader, the black knight. In fact, is it really a coincidence that the Jedi's are called Knights and they fight with swords? Would the Han Solo character be out of place as a rogue in a fantasy novel? The force takes the place of magic, but how does it differ? Even the battle of good and evil is represented, since the Dark side of the force is there to temp the pure.
Of course, there are SF books that are character based. Ben Bova's SF novel Millennium is heavily centered on characters. So is Lucifer's Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle. The Gap series by Stephen Donaldson is highly character driven. This doesn't surprise me in the least, since Donaldson's first eight books were fantasy.
Yet by and large, the main pull of Science Fiction is technical. Hard core fans love nothing more than to poke holes in an author's science. Fantasy fans, on the other hand, seem content to allow themselves to be swept away by a story, without picking it apart.
Science fiction fans are more likely to engage in a conversation arguing about almost anything. They'll discuss an issue to death, circling it, swooping down, then pulling back again. Fantasy fans tend to be less serious, more zany and more spontaneous. As far as I can tell, more fantasy fans have tried e-books than SF fans. Both fans take their genres seriously.
I find myself between worlds. I can seriously talk about aspects of science and sometimes like to find flaws in the books I'm reading. At other times, I like to let everything slide and just be entertained. I can hang with either group and feel a part of it, though at this point, I'm probably just a bit closer to the fantasy end of the spectrum.
Where does horror fit into this mess? Hard to say. Most of the people I've met that read horror, don't read either fantasy or science fiction. Many of the SF/fantasy fans I know, talk down about horror. Certainly there is a crossover, but horror is tolerated, not embraced, at least at the conventions I've attended.
While I have read horror, I don't consider myself a fan of the genre. Therefore, no one was more surprised than I when I recently wrote my first straight horror story. I still don't know what to do with it. Sometimes I read it and shake my head, wondering how this tale came from my mind.
This is one of the reasons I hate video stores. Most of them combine fantasy, science fiction and horror into the same section. And there are more horror films than SF and fantasy combined. Often, I'll avoid browsing in those stores, just because I find it inconvenient to weed through a hundred films to find twenty I might watch.
The reason for this diatribe? I'm trying to get people to think about what they like to read and why? Analyze your reading habits and try to figure out what it says about you. Do you like happy endings or darker material. Are you partial to gore? Do you avoid thrillers? Do you pick apart books or are you more forgiving? How have your reading habits changed in the last five years? The last ten? Does this mean you're advancing or regressing?
I don't know if the answers to any of these questions actually means anything, but then, as a science fiction fan, I'm almost obligated to place things in neat little boxes.
As a fantasy fan, you just know I'm going to have fun with whatever answers I come up with.
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